New Orleans With more than twenty candidates signed up for the Democratic primary, they are undoubtedly getting more advice than they want from all corners, friend and foe, including for many that they need to get out of the race, so who am I to throw water on their fire? Regardless, I’ll say this one thing more than one year out, remember James Carville’s line, “it’s the economy, stupid!” Once they do, they need to not take lower wage, service workers for granted in the race against Trump, nor should they mistakenly assume they will turn out in huge numbers to beat him despite the rising inequality, his tax cuts for the corporations and the rich, his anti-immigrant and anti-poor positions and policies, and the endless list of other infractions and embarrassments in the White House.
Why? Because record unemployment is finally forcing wages up at the grassroots. I’ll tell you from the frontlines of the battlefield how I know.
A chain of nursing homes where our union, Local 100, United Labor Unions, has a contract for a number of homes in Shreveport in north Louisiana, had changed hands over recent years. One company in more of a real estate play got in trouble with a REIT and had to declare bankruptcy. A new one has taken over and was bargaining the successor contract for the homes with us. We made our proposal to improve wages, and they came back. We are now going to have a starting wage there of $11 per hour, a significant jump in the land of $7.25 minimums, and there were seniority bumps and shift differentials.
Was this one off, you might ask? No, another contract that came up in Napoleonville on the west side of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge at another nursing home a month ago. There we also won record increases on starting wages and up and down the scale of almost a dollar an hour.
Did we just become stronger or better? I wish!
The reality is that we are catching the wave of record, 50-year lows in unemployment rates close to statistical full employment. Nursing homes require certified nurse aides, so it’s not simply hire-off-the-street, even though companies have not always valued the wages in the same way.
This wave of wage increases shows up in the Fight for $15 effort certainly and has spread to mass employers like McDonalds, Walmart, Amazon, and many others, who can’t get the workers they need. I’m not pretending this is trickle-down and every boat will rise. That won’t happen with the level of precariousness, gigging, and less than full-time work. Nonetheless, there are going to be a ton of lower wage workers who would normally be base voters, and still might be, but who are going to hit the polls with more money in their pockets, and less desperate to throw the bum out. They won’t be focused on whether this employment run is a continuation of the Obama recovery and whether or not Trump’s claims are valid, but they will know their money is better.
Anyone taking these voters for granted will lose badly. They aren’t Trump voters, but truth to tell, many of them are not chronic voters, so the message to our members and many millions more is going to have to be better than, “come out and vote for anybody but….” They don’t like him, but they won’t break a leg to beat him, because they don’t like the elites any better than he does, and for all the sound and fury, they will know their money is better now, even if the rich are richer.